Tag Archives: Storm Thorgerson

St Pauls Gallery in Birmingham are exhibiting fine art print album cover art including pieces from Pink Floyd, 10CC, Led Zeppelin and others.

The event is a celebration of the output from design house Hipgnosis where Aubrey Powell (pictured right) and the late Storm Thorgerson led the design team to create some of the most iconic album cover art in the history of music.

Pink Floyd have had a long relationship with Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis. Storm was a childhood friend of the band growing up in Cambridge and produced many of Pink Floyd’s album covers.

The excellent book Mind Over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd is an excellent document of the amazing work produced by Hipgnosis for the Pink Floyd; additionally, The Album Art of Hipgnosis also covers Pink Floyd but is a comprehensive document of some of the cutting edge creative output of Hipgnosis. Certainly worth looking at these two books.

Exhibition Launch Events

There is a launch event on Saturday 22nd February 2014 at St Pauls Gallery in Birmingham, England, between 10am and 6pm GMT. The exhibition runs from 22nd Feb to 5th April 2014 so plenty of time to go and see this spectacular exhibition of fine art editions of iconic album artwork.

Here is a selection of some of the iconic artwork produced by Hipgnosis for you pleasure. Full itinerary for the day follows after images below.

Pink Floyd A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Pink Floyd Animals

Anthrax Stomp

Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother

Audioslave

Blinker The Star

Bury The Hatchet

Catherine Wheel – Chrome

Catherine Wheel – Adam & Eve

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Deepest Blue Late September

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Ellis Beggs Howard Homeland

Eyeson Tree

Kindred Spirit

Mars Volta

Mars Volta

Pink Floyd Meddle

Mr Lovepants

Muse

Onion girls

Storm Thorgerson Hipgnosis

Pink Floyd Pulse

Pink Floyd Pulse

Cranberries – Wake up and Smell the Coffee

Pink Floyd Ummagumma

Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here Single

Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here

The launch itinerary for 22nd Feb includes the below:

*Amazing works on display by Hipgnosis-Including some classics, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin etc, Plus unseen works and some recently published covers for 10cc

*TALK 2-3pm- From Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis and Graham Gouldman of 10cc

The long-awaited 5.1 version of ‘Wish You Were Here’, mixed by James Guthrie, will be released on 7th November 2011 via independent label Acoustic Sounds. So, all of you that bought an SACD player to listen to Dark Side of the Moon when that was released on SACD will have another disc to add to your collection!

The SACD is, of course, being released as part of the huge release schedule which comes under the title “Why Pink Floyd…” which starts from 26th September 2011.

The release had originally been scheduled for around February 2008 but this never happened!

The man who designed the original artwork and the new artwork you see to the right (apologies for poor quality, I photographed it out of Mind Over Matter book by Storm Thorgerson) had these words to say about the project, “Like Dark Side of the Moon SACD it seemed appropriate to re-present the imagery in a different fashion, same thing but seen differently, just like the music, which would be the same thing but heard differently due to the remix (a remix tailored to the six speakers involved, which of course you have to go out and buy, being as you are living in a consumer society).

One of the features of the original WYWH cover is the involvement of the four elements of antiquity, Earth, Air, Fire and Water or, in our case, sand, wind, fire and water. Thus we decided the subject of the original artwork, or print therof, to the element in question, such that the burning man is now a print buried in a desert, the diving man is a print viewed underwater and the veil is a cloth picture blowing in the wind.”